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APU chips and AMD Radeon™ Dual Graphics

Something for Tim

I looked through tons of notebooks with A10 chips and integrated HD graphic, this should just work with the open driver (it is mostly 7660G)?

Then there are a lot of notebooks with an extra dedicated AMD Radeon HD 7970 to use AMD Radeon™ Dual Graphics (like SLI/Crossfire?). Would this be supported in the open driver or does it use Crossfire (and will probably never be supported*), which isn't supported if I check the matrix?

I understand HD 7xxx is radeonsi, does it work at all yet or are the missing features 'just' about performance?

Thank you.

* I used to have an HD 4770 crossfire setup in the past, when just the open driver came out and nothing happens since then with the open driver...

I looked through tons of notebooks with A10 chips and integrated HD graphic, this should just work with the open driver (it is mostly 7660G)?

Yes. Trinity APUs are supported by the open source driver. You will need mesa 8.0.5 or 9.0 for 3D support.

Originally Posted by disi

Then there are a lot of notebooks with an extra dedicated AMD Radeon HD 7970 to use AMD Radeon™ Dual Graphics (like SLI/Crossfire?). Would this be supported in the open driver or does it use Crossfire (and will probably never be supported*), which isn't supported if I check the matrix?

It should work with the open source driver, however note that for multi-GPU laptops you will need xserver 1.13, xf86-video-ati 7.0.0 and a recent kernel with dma_buf support in order to properly select which GPU is used for rendering. Crossfire could be implemented, but so far no one has tackled it yet.

Originally Posted by disi

I understand HD 7xxx is radeonsi, does it work at all yet or are the missing features 'just' about performance?

Modesetting works fine as do most basic 3D apps. That last major hurdle is fixing flow control in the shader compiler. Once that's working we can enable glamor by default for X acceleration and a lot more 3D apps will work.

Main difference are the kernel versions in the test between 3.3 and 3.6.

The Intel CPU is faster in all tests except the 'Flexible IO Tester', where it lacks behind the apu. Does that imply, the apu is more responsive under load? Like in this video (Llano chipset, not Trinity) Notebook Test: AMD Llano vs Intel Sandy Bridge

The Intel CPU Speed advantage is between 0% (FFmpeg) to 100% (x264).
$143.68 vs $570 (chip price only on amd.com the desktop version and intel.com the mobile version)

Graphic tests cannot be compared, though I am happy that my 6970m with open drivers can compete with the Catalyst driver on the integrated GPU (not mentioning OpenArena, but totally playable ). The dedicated AMD card would be working well in both laptops. The versions of the open radeon driver and x-server are too low to support the integrated GPU, this is why it says LLVMPipe.